June 4, 2021
Last year, Covid-19 had barely engulfed the world when people began anticipating the recovery: preparing for it, imagining it, willing it into being.
At the end of March 2020, for instance, António Guterres, the United Nation’s secretary general, called for a recovery that would lead to “a different economy.” It had been just three weeks since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 a global pandemic and the US suspended flights from Europe, and just a week after India announced a lockdown. Around 36,000 people had died worldwide, no one knew for sure if second or third waves were in the offing, and there were no vaccines. Any sort of recovery, we know now, was a long way away.
May 12, 2021
Used car prices are booming in the US. They jumped 10% from March to April, the biggest spike since 1953, when the government started collecting data. Overall consumer prices rose 0.8%, a bigger increase than expected, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But the pop in prices is not necessarily an immediate cause for concern for inflation hawks worried that the trillions of dollars the government has pumped into the economy will overheat it. What’s happening in the used-car market sheds light on why.
The pandemic strained supply chains
Americans are starting to travel around again as pandemic restrictions ease, and the extra demand for cars is hitting at a time when supply is tight. Car production has been sputtering due to Covid-19. Many manufacturing plants shut down early on in the pandemic as governments struggled to contain the virus. And although car makers have been reopening their assembly lines since then, they have been slowe
March 19, 2021 last updated 16:14 ET People wearing face masks to protect against the coronavirus ride an escalator at a shopping and office complex in Beijing, July 16, 2020 (AP photo by Mark Schiefelbein).
What the U.S. Can Learn From China’s Economic Recovery
The last time the global economy cratered, in the fall of 2008 in the wake of an American banking crisis, it was China that set the pace both in insulating itself from most of the damage, and in generating enough new demand in its own economy to prevent a far worse downturn than the already terrible recession suffered in much of the rest of the world.